GSMA Wins WEPs Award

11th December 2020, London: The GSMA was honoured to receive the 2020 G7-EU Women’s Empowerment Principles Award in the Best Network Category this week, at a high-level forum hosted by UN Women.

The award was appointed by a Youth Jury of young women who judged the GSMA against three criteria: Innovation, Transformation and Impact.

Accepting the award on behalf of the GSMA, Louise Easterbrook, Chief Financial Officer, shared, “The GSMA’s commitment to gender equality in the digital space has been long standing and active. Most recently the Principles have provided a guiding light for our ‘Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan’ and ‘Inclusive Language Guide’, improving our recruitment, retention and progression of women and minority groups. On behalf of the GSMA and our members, my sincere thanks to the G7-EU and the UN for this recognition and for ensuring gender equality is on corporate agendas globally.”

The GSMA launched the Connected Women programme in 2010, leading to the Connected Women Commitment Initiative in 2016. In that same year, the GSMA led the mobile industry to become the first sector to publicly commit to the SDGs, and worked alongside the International Telecommunication Union, International Trade Center, UN Women and UN University to establish the EQUALS Global Partnership for Digital Gender Equality. Today, EQUALS is the largest international partnership bringing the public and private sectors together to bridge the digital gender divide.

More broadly, the GSMA recently joined the Valuable 500 and launched its Framework to Improve Digital Inclusion for Persons with Disabilities, which can be found here. Internally, it has created a forum called OneGSMA to promote a work environment that is representative of the rich diversity of all employees. A recently published GSMA WEPs Case Study on confronting the gender pay gap globally can be found here.

The GSMA would like to take this opportunity to appeal to the entire GSMA membership and the private sector to sign up to the UN Women Empowerment Principles and join us in our gender equality and women’s empowerment work.

– ENDS –

About GSMA

The GSMA represents the interests of mobile operators worldwide, uniting more than 750 operators with almost 400 companies in the broader mobile ecosystem, including handset and device makers, software companies, equipment providers and internet companies, as well as organisations in adjacent industry sectors. The GSMA also produces the industry-leading MWC events held annually in BarcelonaAfricaLos Angeles and Shanghai, as well as the Thrive Series of regional conferences.